‘Han Solo’ Movie Will Be Complex, Layered and Smart

We know that Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Han Solo movie will tell the origin story our favorite smuggler from a galaxy far far away. We’ll likely see Solo meet his co-pilot Chewbacca for the first time, win the Millenium Falcon from Lando (played by Donald Glover), and maybe even fall in love. But we really have no idea what this Star Wars Story anthology movie will look like. But cinematographer Bradford Young does, and he suggests that it will be a very different Star Wars movie than we’ve seen before.

Doing promotion for the Denis Villeneuve-directed sci-fi drama Arrival, Bradford Young was asked by Collider about the upcoming film and admitted that he even thought it an odd fit for him at first:

“Don’t put those guys in a box because they have a vision, they know exactly what they want. They have no hidden agenda, but they do have an agenda; they have a way of seeing that’s very special, and their collaboration is genuinely unique. So I have to say I had to get converted into that. I respect their work, I respect them as filmmakers, but I wasn’t quite sure if there would be a good marriage between what I’m trying to pursue and the work that I’m doing and what they’re doing, but they helped make that real clear to me early on by expressing some real interesting story [and] photographic ideas that really resonated with me.”

Young comes from a mostly dramatic background. He got his start with indies like Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere before tackling the 2013 Western Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. In 2014, he shot DuVernay’s Martin Luther King film Selma and J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year. You can see some of Young’s work here.

Lord and Miller have made a career on subverting expectations and under-promising and over delivering. But with this film, there is no such thing as low expectations, but it seems as if the filmmaker duo will continue to try to subvert our expectations and make a Star Wars film which feels unlike the other Star Wars movies that have come before it. Young calls the directing team “subversive” and explains how the film will be different from what has come before:

“They are prepared to say exactly what they wanna say and it’s complex, it’s layered, it’s smart, it’s visual, it’s dramatic, it’s funny, it’s uneasy, it’s unexpected,” said Young. “We’re doing our own thing, that’s why we’re there. Phil and Chris are there to bring what they bring to their films, their very unique vision, their perspective on story and they asked me to come bring what I bring, and so just for that it won’t feel like any of the other films. And nobody at Lucasfilm is asking us to betray that, they’re saying ‘We’re in full support of what you do and we wanna make sure that we’re able to help you do it in the best way.’ It’s gonna feel like a Star Wars film, but we’re definitely gonna break some rules, and we’re encouraged to do that.“

That last statement excites me. And we’re already seeing that with the first Star Wars standalone movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which certainly seems to have its own distinctive war-movie style.

Young says that both visually and narratively they are being encouraged to do their own thing and that Lucasfilm wants “artists who have a strong vision and voice and perspective.” As for what Lord and Miller’s Han Solo movie will look like, we will have to wait until 2018 to find out. It certainly sounds like the duo plans on pushing their cinematic skills with this adventure, and that’s exciting. I am a fan of their humor, and I love almost everyone involved, so I’m hoping this turns out to be more than a film explaining events that really didn’t need an explanation on the big screen.

The untitled Han Solo film starts shooting in early 2017 and will hit theaters on May 25, 2018.